The status report that answers questions

Most status reports are written to prove the team is busy, and leadership does not have that question. The questions leadership has are four, they are always the same four, and a report shaped around them fits on a page. Here is the shape, copyable; then why each part earns its place.

The template

That is the whole report. Weekly or fortnightly, whichever cadence your commitments actually change at. Nothing else goes in.

Why these four

Committed answers "what are we on the hook for?" — the baseline every other line is read against. It changes rarely, which is itself information: a committed list that churns weekly is a planning problem announcing itself.

Closed honestly is the section most reports fake with "done". Three closes, not one — and the difference recorded whenever the result was not clean — because the delta between promise and result is the only line leadership can calibrate on. A report whose every close is a clean "delivered" is not a good quarter; it is a report that has stopped carrying information.

At risk is a judgement, not a computation — a colour is only worth reading with the reasoning attached. Two sentences per item: what changed, and what decision or help is needed. The second sentence is the report's entire return on investment — it converts reading into unblocking.

Committed early is the section nobody else includes and the one that builds the most trust: the promises made before readiness, with their recorded exceptions. Reporting your own gambles, with names attached, is what makes the rest of the report believable — and counting them at quarter end is where estimation debates go to be settled.

What is deliberately missing

Activity. No "worked on", no ticket counts, no velocity, no per-person anything. Activity lists answer no question leadership has, and every line of activity crowds out a line that needed a decision — the reader's attention is the report's budget, and busy-proof spends it on nothing. The deeper argument is its own essay: report promises against outcomes, never motion.

Also missing: narrative. If a section needs three paragraphs of context, the problem is upstream — the commitment was never specific enough to report on in a line, which is a readiness problem wearing a writing problem's clothes.

Where the report comes from

The template works in any tool, including none. The failure mode is not the format — it is that assembling it honestly takes an hour of chasing, so it decays into copy-paste. In DeliverySheet the four sections are the reports hub read off the live record: the commitment ledger, the closes with their differences, the risk register with the accountable person's reasoning, and the early-commitment list. The report stops being a document someone writes and becomes a view someone opens — which is the only cadence that survives a busy quarter.